Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw III (1990)

Dir. Jeff Burr

Written by David J. Schow

Starring Kate Hodge, William Butler, Ken Foree, Viggo Mortensen, R. A. Milhailoff

            Rummaging through obscure old genre movies is like prospecting for hidden treasure; you can set yourself up in a likely spot, you can search as much ground as possible to increase your odds, but in the end, you still have to get lucky. There’s no substitute for luck. Every once in awhile, you turn up a pretty good one (THE NEST), sometimes you get something useless but singular enough to be interesting (THE AMERICAN SCREAM) and mostly you just get disappointing nothings (THE BLOODYJUDGE). This is especially true for old horror movies, since horror fans are among the least discriminating people on planet Earth and also watch 500% more movies than normal humans. Consequently if there’s anything worthwhile there, it’s usually been discovered long ago. So not only is the prize you seek already exceedingly rare, you’re covering terrain which has already been thoroughly traversed and minutely prospected by fellow travelers. Sometimes, then, your best hope is not that the gold you’re panning for is so obscure as to have never before been seen, but that is has been widely seen, but somehow missed and overlooked, misjudged, misunderstood.

This can happen sometimes; occasionally, a film just happens to be wrong for its time; it’s roundly criticized and dismissed in the moment, only to be rediscovered a generation later with the benefit of time and distance to help the world see subtler charms which were missed by contemporary eyes that expected something else. This is an especially likely fate for offbeat cult genre movies that have even a hint of marquee appeal -- something that draws an audience with disastrously erroneous expectations upon its release, and can never overcome the initial negativity generated by the shock and revulsion that follows from the wrong eyes seeing something they were never meant to see. We talked about this phenomenon back when we discussed Nic Roeg’s EUREKA, a nutty, impressionistic art movie with the gall to try to lure in the normies by casting Gene Hackman and fraudulently passing itself off as some kind of whodunnit.* Some poor suburban dad with a vague memory of liking THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE is not gonna get the fun night at the movies he was hoping for.

Obviously nobody who gets hustled that way is going to come away happy, and generating such universal ill-will so early in a movie’s life is often sufficient to drive away the very people who should see it, dooming a film to immediate and unexamined obscurity. This is obviously a bad PR strategy for the movie in question, but it’s the perfect method of preserving a time capsule for future generations to discover --the cinematic equivalent of getting a mosquito caught in amber-- because it’s one of the few ways to bury a movie so deep and ignominiously that even connoisseurs will fail to unearth it for decades to come. Heck, even Tobe Hooper’s insane TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 suffered a little from this fate; turning his bleak, grueling horror classic into a outrageous campy comedy was not what fans of the first film were expecting in 1986, and you can still find people even today who dismiss it offhand (most have not seen it recently, or they’d have changed their minds). My point is, these things are out there, ready to be recovered, reevaluated, and burnished to their original glory in the eyes of the world.

Alas, LEATHERFACE: TEXAS CHAINSAW III is not such a film.  

Anyway, I can’t say they didn’t warn me. Nobody has ever claimed that LEATHERFACE; TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III was any damn good at all, and if even 1% of humans were capable of enjoying it, I’d have heard from one of them by now. But even so, I dunno, you look at it on paper and think come on, it’s got fucking Viggo Mortensen and Ken Foree, and the absolute greatest fucking trailer in film history how could this not be at least a little entertaining? And here’s the thing: it is a little entertaining. But here’s also the thing: it’s only a little entertaining. It’s not even some kind of EXORCIST 2 style ambitious wrongheaded hubrisical catastrophe, it’s just the most milquetoast final product you could possibly imagine having the words “Chainsaw massacre” in its title. Or even “Texas,” for that matter. It’s mostly not bad, it’s mostly just nothing. Which unfortunately is just about the most unforgivable sin a movie with “Chainsaw Massacre” in its title could possible commit.

It’s not utterly bereft of merit, however; especially early on, there seems like there might be some hope. After a pretty middling re-introduction to Leatherface (now portrayed by R. A. Milhailoff, a former pro-wrestler and one time Full House guest star) and his penchant for bludgeoning young women and wearing their faces, we meet our ostensible protagonists, Michelle (Kate Hodge, THE HIDDEN II) and Ryan (William Butler, FRIDAY THE 13th PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD, writer of THE GINGERDEAD MAN), who the film treats with the exact maximum possible level of resigned acceptance at the necessity of having a couple of victims in a script. But we also waste little time getting to the obligatory TCSM pervy weirdos, first the handsome and apparently harmless Tex (Viggo Mortensen, RENNY HARLIN’S PRISON), and then the less appealing Bible-fixated peeping-tom Alfredo (Tom Everett, a career which has taken him from DEATH WISH 4: THE CRACKDOWN to THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON**).

These early scenes don’t really work, but they do vaguely hint at why you might imagine director Jeff Burr (STEPFATHER II, PUMPKINHEAD 2: BLOOD WINGS, PUPPETMASTER 4, PUPPETMASTER 5, THE WEREWOLF REBORN!) would not be the worst choice in the world for a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie. Or at least, they might, if you’d seen what appears to be his one and only watchable horror movie, 1987’s FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM, a surprising and disquieting anthology film long on uneasy atmosphere and Southern Gothic flavor. The original TCSM and its sequel are more geek show than Flannery O’Connor, but one could dimly imagine Burr recapturing that timeless, stagnating sense of baking sun and decaying sanity and successfully applying it to the debauched world of the Sawyer clan. And in fact, it sounds like that might have been exactly what he intended to do; he wanted to shoot in 16mm, in Texas, and to make it as twisted and grimy as possible.

 But, as you can read in this career-spanningand dream-crushing interview, he had good intentions often, but never the clout to actually make them a reality. In this case, he was hired on at the last minute, with the script already in place, the set already built in California, and a premier date already announced, and that was that. It would not be shot in 16mm, would not be shot in Texas, and would not contain any twist or grime that could feasibly be avoided. New Line, fresh off the underwhelming NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET  5: THE DREAM CHILD and hoping to replace their flagging horror property with a new franchise, would be calling the shots, and, as Burr points out, the final product of that kind of corporate thinking could only be a corporate movie. Which LEATHERFACE indisputably is, and which is the one thing a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie must indisputably never be. It smacks of a film made by responsible, sane people who are just trying to show the kids a good time, and consequently it is irrecoverably hobbled right from the gate. It’s about as perverse and shocking as a Disneyland ride.

So instead of a continuation of the maggot-brained intensity of Tobe Hooper’s two TCSM movies, instead we get a movie which looks and feels like a pretty generic low-budget slasher which would be shot in California and lazily rip off THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. And as far as that genre goes, it’s by no means the worst; I mean, it looks like it was shot by professionals, there’s some production value in there, a couple attempts at some gimmicks. Leatherface drives a jacked up monster truck covered with human skin, for example, which is about as deeply stupid as movies get, but the kind of stupid that’s at least trying to be fun. He also gets a tricked-out chainsaw with the words “The Saw is Family” engraved on the side, which I’m just now realizing is probably a play on “The Sawyer Family,” which is actually kind of funny. Ken Fornee shows up as some kind of survivalist militia guy, I guess, which explains why he has the weapons and wherewithal to actually do battle with the offending backwoods people-eaters. And in the movie’s most interesting idea, they introduce a cute little daughter for the family, who uses a desiccated baby corpse as a doll and gets spoiled and doted on by the older maniacs who are trying to murder up some dinner. Obvious, perhaps, but pleasingly grotesque.

That stuff by itself seems like it should be more than enough to add up to a movie, and yet it somehow doesn’t ever quite seem to make the impact it should. Part of that, no doubt, is the squeamishness of the MPAA, which in the late 80s and early 90s was uniquely merciless to horror films. Consequently, the biggest massacre anywhere in sight is what the MPAA did to it, cutting it to absolute ribbons in order to dodge an unreleasable “X” rating. They might’ve just as well used a chainsaw. Certainly what they did to the film was vastly more brutal than anything the characters ever do on-screen. Numerous shots, and even whole scenes, furtively cut away before anything really awful can happen, deftly refuting any halfhearted claims the film might float to bolster its dubious titular claims. That’s partially a result of the dozens of re-edits, of course; supposedly the film was re-submitted a record 11 times before it got its “R” rating, which would be a badge of honor except that the final product is so mild-mannered. But it’s also just that the movie was kind of a pussycat to begin with. All those cuts definitely didn’t help, but it’s not like it began as an extreme, brutal film only to have all the gore cut out in post; it was always going to be a pretty inoffensive movie, made with with the looming specter of a ratings challenge in mind. And then the MPAA gutted even that. There’s a couple additional moments of blood in the “unrated” cut I saw, but nothing even remotely shocking.*** Even the deleted original ending is barely more nihilistic than a given episode of The Twilight Zone, and not a squib more violent, either.****

So while it would be easy to pin the wholesale failure of the movie on its tortured crucible of ratings-hunting, I can’t really do it. There’s something else missing here. After all, the original TCSM isn’t fundamentally some kind of wall-to-wall gorefest either -- the sequence here wherein our heroine has her hands nailed to a chair and then rips them free is easily as explicitly violent as anything that happens in the original (irony noted: Hooper also tried to avoid explicit violence in the hopes of getting a safer rating -- in his case, an unrealistic PG instead of an R). So it’s not really the violence that’s missing, it’s something more ineffable. It’s the sense of sleaze, of sun-baked dirt and sweat, of decay, of impenetrable, incomprehensible, almost Lovecraftian madness. Hell, it’s the Texas. You miss the Texas. Even inside the Sawyer house, there’s not a frame of this movie that doesn’t have California written on it. And a rather cheap, perfunctory sort of California, at that. Burr and cinematographer James L. Carter (ONE FALSE MOVE) appear utterly incapable of staging anything to convey that they find any of this any more shocking or debased than your average marquee slasher, lighting the movie like a sitcom and framing even the most disturbing content with a listless disinterest. The title character is wearing a mask made from crudely skinned human flesh for the entire movie, but you’d never know this was in any way unusual behavior from the way the movie presents it. It’s there, but the movie makes nothing of it, and in doing so actively diminishes it. It hardly seems possible to take such inherently salacious material and render it so low-impact, but here we are.*****

There’s simply nothing in evidence here which would suggest why anyone involved thought this should be made, what was supposed to be good here. The best it can do is to settle on dimly reminding you of its more formidable predecessors. So it doesn’t really tell a story so much as it checks boxes. You gotta have the chainsaw in there, for example, so there’s a scene with a chainsaw. Now, nothing interesting or memorable happens with that chainsaw, but it’s in there, so it technically qualifies as a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie from a legal standpoint. I mean, you’ve got everything you would want in a TEXAS CHAINSAW movie in there; chainsaw, family dinner scene, creepy hitchhiker who turns out to be in on it, old grandpa propped up at the family table. The ingredients are there, it’s just that not only are none of them even remotely the kind of escalation you’d need by a third sequel to a iconic classic, but they’re also just milder and blander and phonier and more insubstantial in every conceivable way. It’s a movie which seems confused by its own existence, like a stagehand hanging out backstage who suddenly gets grabbed and shoved out in front of an audience by some banker hissing “do it like that other one!”

Which I guess is kinda what happened.

 * ONLY GOD FORGIVES would be a good modern example: a lot of well-meaning respectable citizens saw that trailer and said, “hey there, Martha, that cute young fella you liked so much in THE NOTEBOOK did some kind of  kung fu movie, how ‘bout we make a date night of it?” Most of them will never recover.

**He also plays a character named “Sargent Pepper” in DANCES WITH WOLVES, and that’s a true story.

*** Viggo Mortensen gets to die twice, which is an improvement from his baffling off-screen implied death in the theatrical version. Neither death is any good at all, and his second death is so badly lit that it’s almost indecipherable and was probably cut for clarity rather than delicacy, but I guess that’s a net gain in quantity-over-quality sort of way.

 **** Though it is a vast, vast improvement on the comically nonsensical theatrical ending tacked on by the producers without Burr’s involvement after the only thing test audiences seemed to remember is they liked Ken Foree, who we’re now inexplicably told has survived having his skull sawed open and his body laying submerged in a fetid swamp for several hours. Not that realism is exactly high on a list of my priorities for these movies, but it is at this point that we exit “horror movie logic” and enter the “Bugs Bunny cartoon” universe.

 ***** Alternate take: Here’s the only positive review of the movie I've ever heard of, and it still spends half the review talking about all the things that went wrong with the production, before making a long series of absolutely bewildering claims ("It makes Leatherface scary again!") as if they're established facts.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	The Terror Begins the Second It Starts, which is technically true, I guess, since we’re introduced in the midst of a different Chainsaw Massacre which has immediately preceded the one we will be observing.
TITLE ACCURACY	I mean, Leatherface is pretty prominent, they say it’s Texas even though it’s clearly not, there is a chainsaw, and if killing two people counts as a massacre, then sure. Actually come to think of it, the Sawyers take worse than they give here, so maybe the massacre is what happens to them.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	Yes, the third sequel of four in the original continuity (we don’t talk about the remake continuity around here)
REMAKE?	Not specifically, although I think with the prequel and everything the remake continuity is up to part 3 by now. Oops, I just broke the one rule I established regarding this issue. Forget I said anything
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Cannibals, slashers
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Ken Foree. I guess R. A. Milhailoff counts?
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	No.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No animals that I recall.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	Yes, the little girl has a baby-doll made from a child’s corpse, which, man, that’s so fucked up, I honestly don’t understand how the movie makes it seem like such a mild detail.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Yeah, I’d say so
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Definitely, in fact the first creep we encounter has precisely this desire.
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you absolutely must do battle with a clan of inbred cannibal psycho killers, you could absolutely do worse than running into Ken Foree for backup.

And barely a C-, but still technically proficient enough to save itself from a "D" 

Pumpkinhead 2: Blood Wings

Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings (1994)
Dir. Jeff Burr
Starring Andrew Robinson, Pumpkinhead, and Soleil Moon Frye of all fool people.

    Democracy is a flawed system of government. It can be schizophrenic, unresponsive, vulnerable to domination both by mob rule or by a small but powerful elite. Winston Churchill once said of Democracy, “...Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” But it must be said, when the citizens rise up and make their needs heard, when they speak loudly and with one unified, undeniable voice, we are reminded that the power truly rests with the people. And by 1994, the people had spoken. It had been too long since they had seen their friend, Pumpkinhead. A massive grassroots organization sprang up, rallies were organized, petitions were circulated. 40 dedicated Pumpkinhead fans chained themselves to the lobby of the Motion Picture Organization of America. Then-president Bill Clinton found himself deluged through the mail with hundreds of pumpkins with his face carved on them along with vaguely threatening messages about what the result might be if Pumpkinhead was allowed to stay dead. America couldn't leave dead enough alone.

Finally, in early October 1994, President Clinton gathered his top aides and called a press conference in the Rose Garden. Surrounded by world leaders and cultural luminaries, with tears streaming down his face, Clinton addressed the nation with the news that our prayers had been answered, there would be a Pumpkinhead sequel. The Star Spangled Banner was played. Battle-hardened Generals wept like children, unashamed. Plans were quickly drawn up to carve Lance Henriksen’s face into the ancient rock of Mount Rushmore. Americans, as one, rushed into the streets and culminated the news with a night of celebration unequaled in this country’s --and perhaps the world’s -- long history. At dawn, they finally collapsed into bed (many, nay, most of them now pregnant after a wild night of frantic, hip-bruising orgiastic sex) secure in the knowledge that he would be back. The world seemed new again. As they drifted off into contented slumber, the last thing that passed through their minds was a date. October 19th. P-day. The next morning would see the run rise high in the sky, proud and fierce, over the dawning of a new golden age.

Or possibly some schmuck just bought the rights to the monster and had to make a movie out of it within 3 months before they expired. Which is actually I think slightly closer to what happened.

So OK, this was kind of a mercenary job. But I was still sort of excited to see it, and all because of one man: Jeff Burr. Sure, he spent most of his career directing terrible and deeply unnecessary sequels, including but not limited to STEPFATHER II, LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III, PUPPETMASTER 4 and 5, THE WEREWOLF REBORN! and, I can’t believe I’m writing this, a horror film called THE TELLING which stars the ladies from the perversely popular dear-god-this-really-is-the-end-of-Western-civilization E! original series The Girls Next Door.

But, he also made one film which really surprised both me and Vincent Price with its high quality, the anthology film FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM. It was his first film, and it boasted a bunch of really top-notch performances, complemented by a rich Southern Gothic atmosphere and some imaginatively disturbing horror concepts. So honestly, it seemed like PUMPKINHEAD might be a good fit for the guy, with it’s timeless, folksy backwoods folklore and evocative Appalachian background. I liked all that stuff about the Stan Winston original, and thought a director who had a gift for exactly that kind of thing and less fixation on big rubbery special effects had a chance to make a really great sequel.

Pumpkinhead spends a surprising amount of his time walking through doorways.

Turns out, though, that this one is exactly as shitty as you might expect, and, predictably, for the exact reasons you’d probably expect. As Burr describes in this detailed and career-spanning interview, producer Brad Krevoy (producer of such varied material as DUMB AND DUMBER, PUMPKINHEAD 4, and ULEE’S GOLD) had randomly ended up with the keys to the Pumpkinhead kingdom, and needed to put them to use before they expired. Burr was brought on at the last minute to adapt a regular non-pumpkin-related horror script into a Pumpkinhead film, and the results is, in his own estimation, his worst film.

The opening sequence is actually pretty good. A bunch of 50’s greaseball preppies drive out into the woods and torture this deformed kid to death. John Gatkins (who you remember in the role of “Dishwasher” from FRED 2: NIGHT OF THE LIVING FRED) does a great job as the preppies’ leader, vicious and a little unhinged but obviously in control. But it doesn’t take long to see that this Pumpkin is rotten. Because it’s not long before we move to the present day and quickly come upon the PUMPKINHEAD series’ achilles heel: annoying college kids.

OK, so these college kids are actually high school kids even though they’re obviously pushing 30, but whatever, it’s a podunk redneck town (though not the same podunk redneck town as the first one -- this one is less Hill People and more Rednecks). The town just got a new Sheriff (Andrew Robinson, who at least looks awake if not exactly making a huge effort) and his infuriating daughter has already fallen in with a bad crowd of teenagers which is for some reason composed of 30-something LA sitcom actors who look more like guest stars from Saved By the Bell than rebellious redneck hoodlums. An odd artistic choice, I know, but maybe it’s a metaphor or something. One of them, incidentally, is Punky Brewster, and for some reason she’s a proud and outspoken Wiccan which one might imagine would go over poorly in this insular backwoods community. But then again, most people in town seem to be well-to-do, highly educated multiethnic LA actors, so I guess that’s probably my own prejudice coming through. Sure, these guys are all for slicing up deformed forest children, but that doesn’t mean they’re not cool with neighbors of all colors and creeds.

But, they should have been focusing more on their deformed-kid-killing problem first, as it turns out. Because just as killing an innocent black artist/heir to shoe fortune gets you a Candyman, so too does killing an innocent deformed forest child get you a Pumpkinhead. And again, a Pumpkinhead is hardly something to celebrate. I’m pretty sure it’s the same suite as before, and looks just as uninspired. But even though he looks the same, there’s a twist here -- its not the same Pumpkinhead! A more accurate title for this movie might be SON OF PUMPKINHEAD, because it turns out the deformed kid was actually the illegitimate spawn of the original Pumpkinhead and a random anonymous mortal woman (I’m thinking a lot of moonshine was involved that night). Through a convoluted process which involves the teens mistakenly burning the old witch’s house down and then for absolutely no reason digging up an unmarked grave, pouring magic blood on it, and reading random spells over it, the deformed forest kid comes back to life and turns into Pumpkinhead and heads out to get some god damn revenge on A) the preppies who killed him in the first place and B) the high school hoodlums who burned down the old Lady’s house and brought him back to life.

So it does have one advantage over the original, which is that we very much want to see these particular groups killed off. But in doing so it loses the central tragedy which made the original almost work, which is that to get Pumpkinhead to do your dirty work you have to give up your soul. This Pumpkinhead is working for himself, so there’s no moral ambiguity here. And while I’m always game to watch a big rubber monster eat a bunch of rednecks and/or 30-year-old highschoolers, I just can’t get too into this Pumpkinhead fellah. He looks silly*, he moves slow, and he doesn’t really kill all that good. He doesn’t have a signature weapon or anything and he’s just a big slow-moving puppet, so all he can really do is burst through doors while rave lights flash around him and then awkwardly whack the individual in question with those big goofy hands of his. Who has nightmares about getting slapped to death by a demon? Pretty middle-of-the-road monstering, in my opinion. Even Mansquito knows to throw in a few gimmicks here and there!

          

           Now with Karate Chop action! Dude looks like fucking Guyver:

.

So Pumpkinhead is kinda a wash, and his backstory is now both more convoluted and less interesting. But of course the real loss here is the lack of Lance Henriksen. Horror staple Andrew Robinson (HELLRAISER, Scorpio from DIRTY HARRY) is a perfectly fine actor, but he mostly seems to serve as exposition and barely gets personally involved. I guess we're supposed to care about his daughter (generic blonde Ami Dolenz), but the first thing we see her do is lie to her father, followed by burning an old woman to death and covering it up, so I hope you'll forgive me for kinda siding with the Pumpkin Man on this one. So Robinson's a cold fish, his daughter and her friends are actively irritating, and without the strong central presence Henriksen brought to the original, the whole thing feels manufactured, plastic, and disposable. Robinson is supposed to be a big-city cop who has returned to his hometown for some peace of mind, but the town itself is vaguely described and never seems legitimately isolated or backwards. Everyone is clean and well-groomed, wearing the latest (1994) fashions, and even Bill Clinton’s brother Roger is the town’s jheri-curl-mulleted mayor (seriously). There seem to be a couple of farmers living on the edges of town, but it never for a second conjures that time-stands-still vibe that the original PUMPKINHEAD actually got pretty right. It’s a shame, because as a director Burr is definitely capable of better than this. To his credit, he throws in a couple of pretty shots here and there, but mostly the whole thing looks like it was shot in a few weeks (it was) and scripted, as Burr says, by people with “no real affection or affinity for the genre. It was really quite frankly not a good script, but it had to be shot by a certain date to retain the rights. Again, all the wrong reasons to make a movie.”

Reading the interview, it gets a little depressing to see how this poor guy, so full of good ideas, could never really get a break. Stranded in B-movie horror land, it usually seems like he was the only person actually interested in making a real movie. But that’s still no excuse for a sub-par PUMPKINHEAD sequel, so as penance he followed it up with arguably the best Scarecrow film ever, NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW. That one gets right most of the things PUMKI2HEAD gets wrong, with significantly improved atmosphere, a nice legitimately rural feel, and an emphasis on genuine scares rather than monster effects. I still believe there’s a germ of genuinely good idea in this whole Pumpkinhead** thing, but to realize its full potential for the next sequel it’s gonna take people with both the steely artistic dedication and the resources to do something truly right.

Next week: Enter the SyFy channel.  

PUMPKINHEAD CHECKLIST:

Lance Henriksen:                                       NO

Bland And/or Irritating White Kids:             WORST EVER

Satisfying Kills:                                           ONE

Horror Icon You Wouldn’t Expect 

They Could Get For This:                           ANDREW ROBINSON

Pumpkinhead Smacks People 

With His Big Stupid Hands:                        CONSTANTLY

Attempt at Appalachian Accents:               BARELY

At All Watchable:                                        NOPE

*Actually I just realized he looks like that stupid Alien Hybrid at the end of ALIEN: RESURRECTION, so perhaps I was predisposed to be unimpressed and mildly irritated at the poor guy. Compare: 

**This marks the 24th occurrence of the word "Pumpkinhead" in this review.  

From a Whisper to a Scream

From a Whisper to a Scream (aka Offspring, 1987).

Dir Jeff Burr

Starring Vincent Price, Clu Gulager, Terry Kiser, Harry Ceaser

 Yeah, this isn't in the movie

                                                    

Don't you hate it when you're in the mood for a certain kind of movie, you find something that looks perfect, and then it's completely different than what you thought? That was my experience with 1987's Vincent Price horror anthology FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM. I was looking for a little horror film to ease my transition from into the October horror marathon. I was feeling entirely worn out and exhausted, and figured I needed something with a nice Halloween vibe but nothing too overwhelming. Something kind of crappy that I could zone out to but still whet my appetite for the season (the first of October is like the start of football season to the horror geek). I settled on this minor-looking cheapie horror anthology for three excellent reasons.

1: It stars Vincent Price. Price alone all but guarantees a certain unique vibe of macabre but usually overwrought (if not outright campy) horror film.

2: It's a horror anthology. Horror probably has a greater per capita ratio of anthologies to full-length films than any other genre, but most of them are not really all that, you know, good. Even most of the classic entries into that genre are not good. Does anyone actually like anything other than the last segment of TRILOGY OF TERROR? Of course they don't.

3: 1987. That's the same year as ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING. Not a great time for horror films, and even those legitimately great ones like EVIL DEAD II tend towards goofy, fun times rather than disturbing nightmares.

So I figured I had WHISPER pegged. I settled back, cracked open a MD 20/20, and let my eyes glaze over. The film begins promisingly enough with a lady who looks like she was built from the spare parts of 1985 who's being executed in soft focus via lethal injection. A reporter at the scene leaves and heads straight for Vincent Price's house –a sort of museum/library/gothic Southern Mansion, or at least a painting of one-- to ask him what he thinks caused his niece (the executee) to snap and become a sociopathic murderess a la MONSTER but uglier and 80sier. Price is looking very, very old and very, very tired, and halfway attempting a sort of Tennessee accent every fifth line or so in the grand tradition of Peter Cushing's SHOCK WAVES German cadence. The library he lives in looks like it could have been built and lit by Roger Corman himself. Price pontificates grandiosely (albeit in a way which suggest he was too tired to complain about one more take) about how the town itself is to blame for the murders. He tells four stories of residents of the town who have come to bad ends, bookending everything (unnecessarily, he appears in-between the stories as well to rehash exactly what he said before the last one.) Yes sir, this thing was looking like just what I had in mind.

But then something entirely unexpected happened. The movie got good. Not watchable, not better than expected; good good. The first story stars RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD'S Clu Gulager (absolutely unrecognizable) as a tightly wound grocery story manager who pines for a gorgeous but aloof female employee even as his devotion to his invalid sister holds him back. This story has about every ick scenario ever put in a horror movie, including but not limited to rape, incest, necrophilia, murder, cannibalism and terrible songwriting. No problem, except that it's executed to the hilt with a kind of sweaty, atmospheric mix of gritty realism and nightmarish Southern Gothic surrealism. Here's how good it is: when a tiny anamatronic monster zombie appears, you will only laugh a little. And you'll be genuinely unnerved as soon as you see the expression on Gulager's face. It's an upsetting little tale which treats its subjects dead serious and indulges in a pitch-black sense of humor only to heighten the horror, rather than relieve it.

This poster has even less to do with the film than the first one.

                        

The second tale, featuring a fantastic Terry Kiser and an even better Harry Ceaser focuses on a low-life scuzzball who is rescued, near death, by a swamp-dwelling recluse with an unspeakable secret. It's has a low-key sinister crawl building to another genuinely shocking moment, but its real strength is a superb sense of time and place, intelligently milking both evocative beauty and alien menace from its swamp setting.

The third story, the inevitable “weakest of the segments,” is about a carnival glass eater and his would-be girlfriend and their doomed attempt to leave against the wishes of the carnival's witchy owner. It also has plenty of atmosphere and great performances, but it's narratively a bit weaker than the first two, failing to get the most out of its gore hound ending.

The fourth story is not the best, but it may be the most interesting. It finds a group of despicable Union soldiers (who are introduced murdering surrendering Confederate troops without realizing that the war has ended) at the brink of their discovery of a mysterious farm, abandoned except for a curiously well-organized society of war orphans. It's a little BEYOND THUNDERDOME and a little CHILDREN OF THE CORN, and it admirably builds a creepy scenario while cultivating (but not overplaying) its central metaphor about what happens to a society born out of violence which loses track of the context of that violence. Unfortunately, its also the only story which feel a bit rushed as an anthology segment. We can guess where this is going, but the story zips along to the big conclusion without the pleasure of milking the menace for awhile. The other three segments make great, self-contained short stories, but this one probably deserved a novella.

I mention literary equivalents because one of the most intriguing and successful aspects of this film is that it truly captures the feeling of an effective short story. Most anthologies superficially mimic the abbreviated form of storytelling, but few capture the profoundly mysterious quality of the best short fiction, which often isn't so much interested in telling a story as it is at hinting at a story and letting your mind fill in the gaps. The best short fiction suggests rather than tells; few short film anthologies seem to really understand that. This one, for whatever reason, has that lyrical, amorphous quality of cultivating mood and mystery with a few simple strokes and letting the viewer do the work of exploring the dark corners it only hints at. Which is not to say that its some sort of arty narrative-free tone poem; each segment tells a complete story. But what lingers is the shapeless darkness which pervades each story, ties them together, and brings forth something a little more menacing than the straightforward horror show that exists on the surface.

The director here is Jeff Burr, who impressed Vincent Price enough to sign onto one of his last film roles. This was his first big film, but he would on to be a prolific director of shitty sequels to horror films like TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III, and sequels to PUMPKINHEAD, PUPPET MASTER, STEPFATHER, and others. Too bad, because here he shows serious promise. This one is intriguing and unique and deserves a place in any horror anthology buff's heart.